9 ms·
Ohio prison inmates 'built computers and hid them in ceiling' (2017)
- Anonbrit 6mo agoNearly a decade old story now
- cwillu 6mo ago[2016]
- Quarrelsome 6mo agoThat's some fine problem solving, albeit not the problems the prison wanted to be solved. I sometimes wonder if these sorts of people who "succeed" in these odd ways on the wrong side of the criminal fence, would have had rather successful careers had just a couple of things gone differently towards the start of their life.
- jzemeocala 6mo ago"we are all just a few mistakes away from becoming the people we pity and frown upon"
- heffert 6mo ago[flagged]
- homeonthemtn 6mo agoWhoa there fellah. Maybe take a breath your self.
- heffert 6mo ago"Oh nooo don't criticise muh heckin criminalerinos, fella!" You're too domesticated to understand.
- CursedSilicon 6mo ago"Some people are just losers. Accept that" At least you outed yourself in your original post
- heffert 6mo ago>Investigators found software, pornography and articles about making drugs and explosives on the machines. These are the "winners" you are championing btw. And that's after whatever heinous crime landed them in prison in the first place, and after they stole computers from a program designed to assist them with training and reintegration. But the soy-faced bleeding hearts of HN can't see past the sheer ingenuity of throwing a PC in the ceiling and plugging in an ethernet cable...
- Geezus_42 6mo agoAs a US citizen, everything you described sounds pretty god damn American to me. What's more patriotic than getting wasted and looking at some nice melons while blowing shit up? That's real freedom right there mf'er. Only thing missing is some guns. Sounds like you hate freedom.
- heffert 6mo agoThe absolute state of mutts lol
- AngryData 6mo agoMost certainly many could. You don't get 25% of the world's prison population without spending every effort to screw over your own citizens.
- roughly 6mo agoThis is the other side of the coin of Uber violating state and local regulations for the better part of a decade to get their business off the ground or HSBC laundering money for the cartels.
- alexpotato 6mo agoI've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught." I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true: - smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).
- FpUser 6mo ago>"smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison" I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life
- mothballed 6mo agoCrime is also just more accepted in "disadvantaged locales." Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.
- shmeeed 6mo agoAka the Broken Window Theory.
- mothballed 6mo agoSort of yeah, but in this case "broken windows" are used to determine the culture of an area, even if you fixed the "broken windows" I would use some other clues. I think the broken window theory relies on the idea if you fixed the broken windows crime would change, which I don't think is necessarily true.
- Grimblewald 6mo agoI'd argue prison iq distribution is more flattering than that of most c-suits, with less crime to boot.
- stackghost 6mo agoYou'd be incorrect. It's been well established that lower IQ is moderately associated with higher rates of criminality. I have no comment on whether C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't. Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoI wonder about the IQ distribution in mental health facilities. The mental health system is basically a penal system in white coats. My parents often pointed out a very tall bearded homeless man who would stand in the intersection and shout at cars. They called him “Bigfoot”. Mom explained that he had multiple college degrees, such as physics, and indicated that he was a waste of a life.
- Avicebron 6mo agoMaybe he realized screaming at cars was more productive than being an actuary so someone who inherited their way through Yale and Blackrock could make the world a worse place.
- jackmottatx 6mo ago[dead]
- coldtea 6mo ago>You'd be incorrect. It's been well established that lower IQ is moderately associated with higher rates of criminality. Consider who is doing the "establishing" and what criminality they ignore because those doing it do not even go to prison or jail 99% of time.
- itsthecourier 6mo agoI have dealt with many criminals through my life. some simply wanna be Pablo Escobar and become a reggaeton poster child. they don't do it for other reason than become their mental image of a gangster. yes, they are intelligent but they insist and insist into do what they consider cool, and that coolness come to be a "hacker" or a criminal so far from top of my mind I remember a serial corporate scammer, a social media middle man who constantly sell access to people working in meta (unlocking/locking accounts), a drug precursor middlewoman, a money laundering mule/scammer/errand boy. every time it was the same. they wanted to show a gangster luxury life in ig. the middlewoman was something else, never got to understand her. 60 years. probably she was just for the thrill of it. had they opportunities to do something else? repeatedly. specially after prison or with family help. but they refuse, the next business will be the one. they will become millionaires for sure. jail again.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 6mo agoI want to point out just one example. There's a guy by the name of Michael Lacey who is popular in Tiktok under the name Comrade Sinque [1]. He spent 21 years in prison. It was a much longer sentence. I'm not sure what happened to get him out much earlier. What was his crime? Felony murder. Sounds bad, right? So what were the details. At age 19 he and a friend burgled a house. The homeowner killed his friend. That was it. Many Americans don't realize how this works and how insanely unjust it is. It's called the felony murder doctrine and it is unique to the US. It means that if a felony is being commited and if anyone dies then you, as the felon, can be charged with murder regardless of how they died. In states like Alabama, all burglaries are felonies. So if you and a friend break into a house, the police respond and kill your friend, you can get convicted of murder and sentenced to 30-years in prison. Not a made up example [2]. Anyway, Comrade Sinque is better read than probably at least 95% of Americans. He is thoughtful and intelligent. He wasn't born a criminal (that's 18th century thinking). He's certainly not low IQ (as some would have you believe criminals all are). No, the issue is material conditions. Poverty and a lack of opportunity. We probably spent about $1 million convicting and incarcerating him for 21 years. This doesn't really seem like a good investment. [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@comrade_sinque https://www.tiktok.com/@comrade_sinque [2]: https://apnews.com/article/felony-murder-officer-shooting-alabama-b61f62d011584039e08b5bc02524e3fe https://apnews.com/article/felony-murder-officer-shooting-al...
- nomel 6mo agoConvictions/punishment is also meant to be a deterrent. That one being: don't rob a house in a state with a castle doctrine where the owner is allowed to fucking kill you. If you first hand help someone get killed, you're at fault. Sounds reasonable. But, I also wish we had far far more deterrents, and far more deaths, when it comes to robbers.
- jmyeet 6mo agoThe uS has 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population. We have a higher rate of incarceration than, say, Russia or Iran [1]. If deterrants worked, why do these incidents keep happening? Why isn't this the safest country on Earth? Poverty costs all of us but rather than lifting people out of poverty, we'd rather spend way more on the prison-industrial complex, slavery 2.0 (ie convict leasing) and law enforcement. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
- frakt0x90 6mo agoOf course they would. A criminal is just a person. And with such an extraordinary percentage of the US population in prison, you can expect the full spectrum of ability, intelligence, passion, compassion, and everything else. Our prison system is an extreme tragedy that most people are numb to because it's been that way forever.
- mothballed 6mo agoThere are way too many people that think the human condition can be fixed through powers of the state. The overly broad application of the "justice" system is one aspect of that. Unfortunately there's no clean way to prove this right or wrong, it is a religious like belief the populace holds. Therefore changing the status quo probably requires a religious like message that anyone coldly analyzing it with facts is incapable of delivering. The very method of changing it is out of the hands of those that might recognize what's wrong.
- t1234s 6mo agoCreative.. someone should hire this guy when or if he gets out.
- markus_zhang 6mo agoI wonder if the those articles are from textfiles.com?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- tetrisgm 6mo agoExcellent lateral thinking, and result driven mindset. I’m not being sarcastic either
- codezero 6mo agoThis makes me wonder if people might be getting Starlink Minis smuggled in by corrupt guards.
- eucyclos 6mo agoI've been told by someone who'd been in jail a lot, that attorney-client privilege is a huge loophole in the prison smuggling economy and someone in prison asking if you know "a good lawyer" is asking for a lawyer who would be willing to smuggle in contraband during privileged meetings.
- kotaKat 6mo agoCellphones are always interesting because of the weird game of "sorta legal cellphone jamming" with managed access systems. Can't just jam the phones, but you can set up a carrier-blessed sorta-Stingray that traps 'rejected' phones into a sinkhole network while bounces 'authorized' phones out to macro networks. It's kinda funky and wild.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo agoBoredom and time breeds creativity.
- jldugger 6mo agopreviously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093970
- dang 6mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093970 - April 2017 (188 comments)
- coldtea 6mo agoJust give them computers already... What is with this BS idea of medieval jail conditions...
- glerk 6mo agoTheir thinking is that making the conditions bad will serve as deterrent i.e. would-be criminals would think twice before committing crimes because they're scared of going to prison. Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations. We should use prison time to re-educate these people and try to make them better instead of psychologically torturing them, but here we are, and it's very unlikely things can change within the current political system (too many "checks and balances" for meaningful reforms)
- queenkjuul 6mo agoNot to mention the risk/reward ratio is heavily skewed by the lack of prospects for ex-cons. Once you're in, you got nothing to lose, really.
- coldtea 6mo ago>Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations. Also there are decades and decades of this idea not working out at all...
- qingcharles 6mo agoThey had computers in one place I was in, but not connected to the Net, just for doing some basic word processing and typing tutorials. I found the C# compiler that is hidden several levels deep by default in the Windows directory and decided to teach the other prisoners how to code. I needed some reference materials as it's really hard when you have no docs and literally just the compiler. They don't allow computer books in most places "for security reasons", but a very elderly nun took pity on me and asked me what I wanted. I told her "C# Weekend Crash Course" (I wasn't a C# dev at the time and it was the only title I could think of) and she bought it off Amazon and smuggled in not only the book but the CD-ROM that came with it, bless her. I managed to teach the guys how to write text adventures which they enjoyed. I couldn't think of what else fun I could get them to do with only console text in/out.
- jakelazaroff 6mo ago> Investigators found software, pornography and articles about making drugs and explosives on the machines. I mean… yes, obviously, if you look on a computer you're gonna find software.
- loneboat 6mo agoMaybe you're passing the sentence incorrectly. Could be, "They found software about making drugs/explosives, pornography about making drugs/explosives, and articles about making drugs/explosives".
- dullcrisp 6mo agoOh then the prisoners and I have something in common.
- mrguyorama 6mo agoI mean they are basically describing a chemistry textbook at that point
- queenkjuul 6mo ago[flagged]
- 948382828528 6mo ago[dead]
- tonyedgecombe 6mo agoMore likely you will just get downvoted off the bottom of the page.
- anthk 6mo agoFree roam games in a prison would be highly praised, even if they were dumb Pokémon roms or really old GTA releases. Or just give them long gamebooks -not necesarily fantasy themed- a la CYOA but with pencils and erasers (and, yes, they can be turned into a weapon, but inmates will use for paperwork or prison classes anyway). Some of them allow you to roam under a whole city and solve enigmas/puzzles and fight.
- card_zero 6mo agoI fear that "opportunities for offenders to participate in meaningful and rehabilitative programming" probably does not mean programming. It's the prisoners who get programmed.